Orkut VS Facebook

Monday, December 6, 2010

Facebook has been busy lately acquiring promising start-ups, poaching Google exployees, launching Facebook Places and otherwise tweaking and redesigning elements of its bread and butter social networking platform. After the initial build up, the official blog has announced new and redesigned profile pages for Facebook. The redesign will be automatically applied Facebook wide in the coming weeks, but if you're the impatient kind and want to be an early adopter, follow these steps to unlock the new Facebook profile:

Browse over to this page.
Hit the green button at the top right.
Revel in the latest redesign of your profile page.

Revisions to the profile page include a summary listing of personal information right below the user name at the top of the page. It carries information on user's employment, hometown, college details, relationship status, languages spoken and birth date. This will be followed by a filmstrip of recently tagged photos placed directly below. Overall, a greater emphasis on photos is apparent with the new design.

According to the blog, you can now "highlight the friends who are important to you, such as your family, best friends or teammates". These featured friends will be displayed at the left hand side and come with the ability to incorporate new friend groups or existing friends lists. Interests and activities carry increased focus on the profile pages.

Another major diversion is a lack of a ready text field to enter new status updates. The new design incorporates different content sensitive buttons to post status updates, photos, links and videos to your profile. I find that this speeds up the process as earlier one would have to wait for the icons to show up after clicking on the text field.

Finally, the new profile adds new ways to share interests and activities. The official blog elaborates, "You can list the projects you worked on at your job, classes you took in school, your favourite musicians and sports teams, and more." It also adds a Philosophy section where one can also share their life philosophy by incorporating preferences on religions, political affiliations, in addition to your role models. Interests and experiences are now represented with images in keeping with the visual centric theme of the new profile.

Check out Facebooks official video marking the release:

Do you like the refreshed profile page? Leave us a comment and let us know.

Facebook has been busy lately acquiring promising start-ups, poaching Google exployees, launching Facebook Places and otherwise tweaking and redesigning elements of its bread and butter social networking platform. After the initial build up, the official blog has announced new and redesigned profile pages for Facebook. The redesign will be automatically applied Facebook wide in the coming weeks, but if you're the impatient kind and want to be an early adopter, follow these steps to unlock the new Facebook profile:

Browse over to this page.
Hit the green button at the top right.
Revel in the latest redesign of your profile page.

Revisions to the profile page include a summary listing of personal information right below the user name at the top of the page. It carries information on user's employment, hometown, college details, relationship status, languages spoken and birth date. This will be followed by a filmstrip of recently tagged photos placed directly below. Overall, a greater emphasis on photos is apparent with the new design.

According to the blog, you can now "highlight the friends who are important to you, such as your family, best friends or teammates". These featured friends will be displayed at the left hand side and come with the ability to incorporate new friend groups or existing friends lists. Interests and activities carry increased focus on the profile pages.

Another major diversion is a lack of a ready text field to enter new status updates. The new design incorporates different content sensitive buttons to post status updates, photos, links and videos to your profile. I find that this speeds up the process as earlier one would have to wait for the icons to show up after clicking on the text field.

Finally, the new profile adds new ways to share interests and activities. The official blog elaborates, "You can list the projects you worked on at your job, classes you took in school, your favourite musicians and sports teams, and more." It also adds a Philosophy section where one can also share their life philosophy by incorporating preferences on religions, political affiliations, in addition to your role models. Interests and experiences are now represented with images in keeping with the visual centric theme of the new profile.

Check out Facebooks official video marking the release:

Do you like the refreshed profile page? Leave us a comment and let us know.

Tuesday, November 23, 2010

There are a couple of reasons why you may want to download your Facebook Photo albums (or that of your friends) to the desktop:

For viewing pictures even while you are offline.
For sharing photo albums with family members who aren’t very active on social sites. Just download a local copy of your Facebook albums and send them as email attachments or burn a DVD.
You have decided to close your Facebook account and therefore need a quick mechanism to move all your existing Facebook albums to another photo sharing website (like Flickr).
For offline backup.

To download any of your Facebook photo albums with ease, all you need is Fotobounce – it’s a free Windows-only utility that would help you manage photos in your Facebook and Flickr accounts right from the desktop.
You can download old photos, upload new ones to the web or simply view your existing photo albums as a slideshow without downloading them locally.
Fotobounce also includes built-in face recognition (similar to what you have in Google’s Picasa Albums) so you can quickly tag photos on the desktop and these people tags will be preserved even when the photos are uploaded on to Facebook.

Search the Facebook Apps directory for something like “export contacts” and you’ll come across quite a few applications that sound as if they can transfer your friends contact information out of Facebook.
There’s an app called “Export Friends” that will save you friends names, city, birthday and their current location in a CSV (text) file that you then import into Excel, Gmail or any other web email program.
Then there are social plug-ins that can sync photos and status updates of your Facebook friends with matching contacts in Outlook.

The problem is that none of these apps can download what you are looking – the phone numbers and email addresses of your Facebook friends. There are Greasemonkey scripts and other hacks that can pull this information from Facebook through “web scraping” but don’t ever take that route as Zuckerberg’s army might ban your account forever.

Export Email Addresses of your Facebook Contacts

Facebook APIs don’t expose email addresses of users and hence none of the Facebook apps can provide you with the actual contact data of your friends. There’s however a simple (and perfectly legal) workaround that can help you easily download all your friends email addresses from Facebook’s walled garden.

How to Export Email Addresses of all your Facebook Friends

Search the Facebook Apps directory for something like “export contacts” and you’ll come across quite a few applications that sound as if they can transfer your friends contact information out of Facebook.
There’s an app called “Export Friends” that will save you friends names, city, birthday and their current location in a CSV (text) file that you then import into Excel, Gmail or any other web email program.
Then there are social plug-ins that can sync photos and status updates of your Facebook friends with matching contacts in Outlook.
The problem is that none of these apps can download what you are looking – the phone numbers and email addresses of your Facebook friends. There are Greasemonkey scripts and other hacks that can pull this information from Facebook through “web scraping” but don’t ever take that route as Zuckerberg’s army might ban your account forever.

Export Email Addresses of your Facebook Contacts

Facebook APIs don’t expose email addresses of users and hence none of the Facebook apps can provide you with the actual contact data of your friends. There’s however a simple (and perfectly legal) workaround that can help you easily download all your friends email addresses from Facebook’s walled garden.
The trick, as you can see in the video, is actually quite simple.
Go to address.yahoo.com and click the Facebook icon. A login dialog should pop-up, just sign-in with your Facebook credentials and within seconds, you entire Facebook address book will be available inside your Yahoo Mail Account. Once the import is done, click this link to download a CSV file with the email addresses of all your Facebook contacts to your desktop.
You can then import the CSV file into Gmail Contacts, LinkedIn, your phone address book or any of the social sites where you want to connect with your existing Facebook circle.Update: If Yahoo! is unable to import your Facebook Address book, open your Facebook page and choose “Application Settings” under Account. Next remove the “Yahoo! Contact Importer” application from your Facebook profile and try the steps mentioned in the video again.

Saturday, November 20, 2010

I kept hearing about Orkut, joined it one day. Found many of my lost contacts, collegues, and friends.

Well, for dummies like me Orkut is a social networking website launched by Google in January, named after Orkut Buyukkokten, a Google engineer who created it. It aims at connectings users to their friends and their friends' friends for talking, dating and business networking. Only people invited by an orkut member can join, create profile, join communities, and check for friends and other people.

I wondered who this Orkut Buyukkokten is.

Browsed www, found his snap. Looks cool isn't it??? Looks pretty young isn't it? Thought will check out more details.
Well, Orkut Buyukkokten was born on 6-Feb-1976, in Konya, Turkey.
Did his high school from Konya Meram Anadolu Lisesi (1986-93), BS Information Engineering from Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey (1993-97). Currently pursuing a PhD in Computer Science at Stanford University in the Database Group.

Thought, if he has created Orkut, he should be there. Found his profile there. Sent a friend request, but didn't get a reply. But Amazing number of scrape entries!! 470449 scraps!!!!

Found some funny information on net about Orkut's earnings, but I am sure if this is not right:
Orkut Buyukkokten(the creator of Orkut) gets $12 when every person registers to this website.
He also gets $10 when you add somebody as a friend.
He gets $8 when your friend's friend adds you as a friend & gets $6 if anybody adds you as a friend in the resulting chain.
He gets $5 when you scrap somebody & $4 when somebody scraps you.
He also gets $200 for each photograph you upload on Orkut.
He gets $2.5 when you add your friend in the crush-list or in the hot-list.
He gets $2 when you become somebody's fan.
He gets $1.5 when somebody else becomes your fan.
He even gets $1 every time you logout of Orkut.
He gets $0.5 every time you just change your profile-photograph.
He also gets $0.5 every time you read your friend's scrap-book & $0.5 every time you view your friend's friend-list.
Many Global Financial Consultants think this person might become the richest-person in the world by the end of 2009.
Finally, this is the best fact. This person has 13 assistants to monitor his scrapbook & 8 assistants to monitor his friends-list. He gets around 20,000 friend-requests a day & about 85,000 scraps a day.

As I continued to search about Orkut Buyukkokten, found that there were some court cases against him.

A small social-networking software company has filed suit against Google, claiming that much of the source code behind orkut.com, the search engine's popular social service, was stolen by a former engineer. In its lawsuit, Affinity Engines, based in Palo Alto, California, said engineer Orkut Buyukkokten illegally took the code that he had written for the company -- which he co-founded -- with him when he joined Google.

Affinity Engines also claimed that Buyukkokten promised Affinity Engines that he wouldn't develop a competing social-network service for Google. Affinity Engines, which filed the claim on May 25 in Santa Clara Superior Court, is seeking unspecified damages and royalties.

A guy lost his girlfriend in a train accident.... But the gal's name nowhere appeared in the dead list. This guy
grew up n became IT technical architect in his late 20's, achievemnt in itself!!.

He hired devlopers from the whole globe and plan to make a software where he could search for his gf through the web...
Things went as planned... n he found her, after losing millions of dollars and 3 long years!!

It was time to shut down the search operation, when the CEO of Google
had a word with this guy n took over this application,

This Software made a whopping 1 billion dolar profit in its first year,
which we today know as ORKUT.

The guy's name is ORKUT BUYUKKOKTEN.Yes its named after him only. Today
he is paid a hefty sum by Google for the things we do like scrapping. He is expected to b the richest person by 2009.

ORKUT BUYUKKOTEN today has 13 assistants to monitor his scrapbook & 8
to monitor his friends-list. He gets around 20,000 friend-requests a day
& about 85,000 scraps!!!

Some other Cool Facts abt this guy:

* He gets $12 frm Google when every person registers to this website.
* He also gets $10 when you add somebody as a friend.
* He gets $8 when your friend's friend adds you as a friend & gets $6 if anybody adds you as friend in the resulting chain.
* He gets $5 when you scrap somebody & $4 when somebody scraps you.
* He also gets $200 for each photograph you upload on Orkut.
* He gets $2.5 when you add your friend in the crush-list or in the hot-list.
* He gets $2 when you become somebody's fan.
* He gets $1.5 when somebody else becomes your fan.
* He even gets $1 every time you logout of Orkut.
* He gets $0.5 every time you just change your profile-photograph.
* He also gets $0.5 every time you read your friend's scrap-book & $0.5 everytime you view ur friend's friend-list.

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

In a day where social networks are increasing there are hardly any tools which offer feature like integration of all contacts to one place so that you can catch all your friends who are in Yahoo, G Mail and on Hot mail or in Facebook to one place so that you don’t need to switch to different places to talk with all your friends. So let’s start with the procedure wherein you can compile all your friends at one place. There are two phases wherein in first phase we will see how you can export facebook contacts and save to Yahoo, G Mail or even Hot mail. And then later we will see how you can import bulk contacts to Google Talk. What finally you can achieve with this task is that you can simply chat with your facebook friends in with the help of G Talk. Procedure to export Facebook contacts and save them to Yahoo / Gmail / Hotmail:

First you need to go to address.yahoo.com and then you will see a screen as shown below after you sign in to your Yahoo account.

After signing in, all you will find a screen as shown above and now click on facebook icon and after clicking on facebook icon a new window will be opened up where in you need to authorize the sharing by clicking on OK as shown below:

Now as soon as you click on OK, within few seconds you will receive a screen saying that your contacts have been successfully imported.

Once the import is done, click on this to download a CSV file as shown below which has all the email addresses of all your Facebook contacts to your desktop.

Most importantly while importing the contacts to Gmail, assign it to some group which will help you easily add them in Google Talk which we will see at a later stage.

How to import bulk contacts to Google Talk.

Now, go to G Mail account and compose a new email. Type in the name of the group which you named at the time of importing the contacts to the G Mail as shown below

Now, once you have the list of users in the To: field, its time to select Select All and Copy the addresses.

After that open Google Talk and Click on Add button which is located at the bottom of the G Talk client. In the next step paste all the contacts in the empty space as shown above.

Now, click on Next and all the contacts which you selected will either be added directly to your Google Talk if they are Google contacts or will be invited to use Google Talk if they use different clients other than Google.

In similar fashion, if you use any other Social Network like Orkut, You can first download the CSV format file and the same can be exported by above mentioned steps and can make use of all the friends who use Orkut or My space or any other social Networking site.